Letitia Green Stevenson was the wife of Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson I who served in the second administration of President Grover Cleveland.
Background
Letitia Green was born on January 8, 1843. She was the daughter of Presbyterian Reverend Lewis W. Green (1806-1863), who was the head of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and Mary Peachy Fry, a descendant of Joshua Fry. After her father died the next year, Green moved with her mother north to Chenoa, Illinois, where her sister Julia lived.
Education
She was educated at the Walnut Hill Female Institute in Lexington, Kentucky, and a school near Gramercy Park in New York City.
Career
Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, she returned to Lexington. There, she met and was courted by Adlai Ewing Stevenson, a graduate of Centre. The pair wed at Julia"s house on December 22, 1866.
They carefully planned their family in an era before this was common or publicly accepted.
Daughter Mary, nicknamed "Bessie", was sickly as a child and eventually succumbed to tuberculosis in 1895. Lewis was also frequently hospitalized due to complications from an injury sustained while hunting.
After a political appointment in 1884 led to a move to Washington, District of Columbia, Stevenson became engrossed in the emerging women"s rights movement. When Adlai was nominated for Vice President of the United States in 1892, Letitia campaigned on his behalf.
Already used to public speaking through her leadership of Bloomington women"s clubs, Stevenson spoke on her husband"s behalf, especially in opposition to the Lodge Bill.
She also typically wrote an acknowledgment letter to local media after campaigning in a city. Their great-grandson, Adlai Ewing Stevenson III, was a United States. senator from Illinois from 1970 to 1981 and an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Illinois in 1982 and 1986. She suffered from severe rheumatism and migraine headaches that often forced her to wear leg braces.
Nonetheless, she was described as a "keen observer and judge of people, and a charming hostess"".
She helped establish the Daughters of the American Revolution to try to heal the divisions between North and South after the Civil War and succeeded Mistress Benjamin Harrison as President General.
Death
She died aged 70 in 1913.